Flat-out farce relies on fancy footwork

By Jason Blake

Party piece ... Garth Holcombe, right, as the tortured Holger with Laurence Coy, centre, as the disappearing boss Robert.

The German playwright David Gieselmann’s intricately cut-up comedy opens with the fag end of an office Christmas party just as entrepreneur Robert informs his deputy manager Holger that he is about to enact a long-cherished ambition: to disappear. Utterly. Not for a while, but forever.

But Robert’s plan conflicts with the nervy Holger’s urgent desire to quit his job – he is being wittily and cruelly bullied by an office junior, Heidrun – and the retirement plans of Robert’s Italophile wife, Gerlinde. She wants to move to Liguria.

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As promised Robert disappears and Holger finds he is bullied more than ever as Robert’s son Helmar – who wants the top job – conspires with Heidrun to tip him over the edge. Can the psychiatrist Dr Asendorf help? And what of Robert’s previously unknown, pigeon-fancying half-twin Francois? While issues of corporate succession and embezzlement are wrangled over, boundaries stretch and blur for characters and audience alike.

Gieselmann is best known here for his Hitchcockian black comedy Mr Kolpert. The Pigeons (translated into English by Maja Zade) is a less compelling piece of playmaking but Sarah Giles’s production – the Australian premiere – makes for a very entertaining 65 minutes of flat-out farce nonetheless.

The rapid cutting between conversations and locations, all of which are played as if they are occurring in the same time and same space, is a test of timing and control and Giles’s ensemble (working barefoot, which adds a dash of nimbleness to the action) perform it with clockwork precision, led by Laurence Coy’s cranky Robert, Garth Holcombe’s tortured Holger, Ashley Ricardo as Holger’s apoplectic wife, and Fayssal Bazzi as Dr Asendorf, fast losing track of who he is treating and who he is sleeping with.

Opening night adrenaline made for some breathless passages of play, but for the most part The Pigeons is roaringly funny and brevity is on its side. Just as the novelty of Gieselmann’s structure and his characters’ concerns begin to wear thin, the play’s end comes into sight.